From the Director's Desk - October 2013

Greetings! As summer slides effortlessly into crisp autumnal days of cool mornings and sparkling blue days, we look forward to exciting programs here at the library. Throughout October we have loads of programs for children, from story times for the littlies to the young critics’ group for4th-6th graders. For adults there are a number of author visits; book discussion groups; the Artscapades series of art appreciation lectures; the Great Decisions Discussions with the World Affairs Forum as well as the highly anticipated, annual Stoddard Art Lecture on Sunday 20th October. This year’s Stoddard speaker will be Helen Evans who is the Curator of Byzantine art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

We continue to grow our offerings learning opportunities in the library with new Saturday morning classes. You can learn to blog with Wordpress, to use Publisher software, to set up and use Goodreads to find and track the books you love, plus much more.

If you’ve been in the library in the last couple of weeks, you’ll have noticed that we shifted the self service checkout terminal. It is now perched very conveniently on the end of the issuing desk- “check it out!” You can issue or renew your books and other materials yourself without having to wait in the queue. We are continually looking for ways to make your experience in the library ever better, so look out for other small changes in the weeks and months ahead.

Looking briefly back into September, New Canaan Library held two fantastic events with books and their authors. First was our Annual Literary Luncheon with Therese Anne Fowler celebrating Z a novel of Zelda Fitzgerald which was a wonderfully successful event. A few days later we held the annual UN lecture where we hosted the scholar and author Reza Aslan talking about his latest book: Zealot. Both events had tremendous community support. It is very exciting to see hundreds of New Canaanites turn out to participate at these stimulating events to learn, grow and exchange ideas.

Along with the great new books we have available for you to borrow, we have also recently added a number of new electronic resources, including more health and wellness sources, links to resources to help navigate the changes in the new healthcare legislation and more. Click on research on the website to see the full range of digital information sources available to library members.

If you haven’t already, take a look at the selection of audio books we have available for downloading- straight onto your smart phone or other device. I’m currently enjoying listening to Barbara Kingsolver reading her latest book: Flight Behavior set in the mountains of Tennessee. To access these audio books, simply click on “One Click” in the right hand column of our website’s front page.